BRAIN 4DEMON 4 decades of Belgian marine monitoring: uplifting historical data to today's needs.

The Belgian scientific community has, in the last four decades, built up consideiable expertise in marine sciences. ~~umerous
scientific expeditions at sea have resulted in a vast quantity of scientific data related to different topics and important publications
in the scientific literature about the marine environment of the Belgian Continental Shelf (BCS). Many valuable, historic data
however still remain inaccessible to the larger scientific community, being available only on paper in various institutions. In
addition, most data need to be thoroughly quality-controlled and intercalibrated to achieve comparability with recent data.
Historical data are essential for understanding long-term changes in the quality of the marine environment. The 4DEMON project
will centralise, integrate and valorise data compiled during expeditions in the BCS over the last four decades, forming an important
Belgian scientific heritage. The project will focus on the compilation of long-term integrated and intercalibrated data sets on
contamination levels (WP3), eutrophication (WP4) and ocean acidification (WPS) in the BCS. To facilitate, coordinate and
streamline data compilation and data interpretation for the different topics, separate work packages on data management (WP2)
and data analysis and integration (WP6) are defined. WP1 ensures overall coordination of all aspects of scientific work and data
and knowledge dissemination.
The 4DEMON project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium of five Belgian partners with a long-standing expertise in
marine science, which hold a large amount ot historic information on the marine environment of the BCS stretching back over a
period of 4 decades. This information will be used to complete and interpret existing data sets. In addition, modern data, like
continuous underway data (e.g. salinity, temperature, pH, nutrients and chlorophyll) and remote sensing chlorophyll a and
turbidity, will supplement the data sets and will aid the data interpretation and intercalibration as they have a much higher spatial
and temporal resolution.